"Pre-Millennial Tension"

It's almost the new year, almost the big 1999, one year away from
the midnight of the century, the new millennium. As much hype that
I hear about this event through religious dooming soothsayers, the
dreaded Y2K bug, the party of the century talk that gets around,
the dawn of the new millennium never ceases to inspire awe inside me.

Think about it. And don't be cynical.

This small religion that developed just thousands of years ago, ignored
at first, then feared, then rapidly accepted, convinced a whole part of
the world that the world would come to an end in 1000AD. Worshippers
looked up to the sky, predicting doom, others thought Hellfire would strike
the earth and purify it of its sinful. The Day of Reckoning was upon
them, and they were to be judged. It inspired terror and love, at the
same time.

Now, 1000 years later, here we are, humankind. Have you ever watched
Millennium, the show created by Chris Carter of X-Files fame? This
show is amazing. What its whole deal is that there is a collection of
prominent scientists, historians, and "gifted" people who've kept alive
the tradition of the Millennium Group, who took it upon themselves to
protect Man from his own destruction. Frank Black is one of the "gifted"
who has used his talent to become a decorated, but also cast-out criminal
profiler. Black has discovered that the Millennium Group is not about
saving humanity from destroying itself in the appointed year, the year
2000, but instead solely wants to be the controlling party after the
smoke has cleared. Its roots are Greek and Roman, but its soul is still
strong in the year 2000. Black's wife dies as a result of the Millennium
Group's mishaps, and he finds his daughter possesses his psychic gift
as well. How are they different? He sees demons, she sees angels.

Millennium, its gothic lighting and atmosphere unsurpassed by other shows
that attempt to copy it, excels with its religious plotlines. Religious
zealots kidnap "chosen" children to save them when the flood comes, a
secret sect of blonde, blue-eyed women struggle to stay alive from those
who wish to kill them, technology-laden companies' CEOs see the destruction
the Y2K bug will cause so they stockpile weapons and food for when the
clock strikes 24:00.

How crazy is believing in Armageddon, really? Now, it's silly to talk
about because religion has taken such a backseat to science and reason.
I believe that right now, we're abusing reason because we see it as
a perfect replacement for that corruptive, dirty "R" word. Sure,
reason has long been taught, but only now has it reached society as a
whole as a way of life...one must be logical and use science as the
basis for belief and rational thinking. Eventually, we'll learn how
to balance reason and religion.

But for those who believe in Judgment Day, are they really kooks for
hoping for or dreading the day when the world ends? Personally, I
feel one of the reasons religion and Millennium are so fascinating
to me, even though I have no religious affiliations (or closet
affiliations, I will add), is that I think it's a beautiful idea that
there is a higher power in this world. I would like to think that
humans are a little more than the most successful beings on this planet
for the time being. I think human creativity can be tapped into most
passionately through religion, or things which inspire the same
reactions as religion. What if man really was the supreme being? What
if there's a plane of existence out there where every soul was judged,
where the guilty were finally caught, where the innocent were treated
right? Ideal justice is what humans will always search for, and never
quite reach. It's not in our nature to always be judicial and logical.

What if certain people were truly gifted with divine talents, and it
was their task in life to find their calling and accomplish their goal?
What if people actually knew that they had lived their whole twenty
years in order to fulfill a task? Millennium covered this when one
man was sent to Earth to protect a fallen angel from being murdered.
John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany was excellently
written about a boy whose every day practicing playing basketball, every
action he performed in school, and every sign he saw pointed him towards
the one day when he would save the lives of those around him (I recommend
you read it, and I won't give you any more details).

I'm a bit of an idealist. Idealism leads to a disappointing dead end
if you're expecting perfection, the same way science leads to an empty
spiritual life. If you believe in something like love, you will be
disappointed if you expect it to work out for everyone. Most of the
time it will fail. You can get into debates about whether those who
truly believe in love will find it, and that sort of thing... But
the bottom line is that idealists admit that a lot of what they wish
for will be unattainable. The interesting thing is that doesn't stop
us from trying to better the world towards that goal, to maintain
that idealistic idea.

I think it would be a fulfillment for those who live just lives to find
out that the bad people, the people who cheat to get ahead, get punished
later on. Granted, it's quite cruel as well to want a spiritual life
to be true only to punish those who slapped you in the face, but there
it is. We're selfish beings.

Where was I? Well, I'm not really religious, but I do wish that there
was a war going on above the mortal realm, some sort of logic and
reason for our living and for why our lives turn out the way they do.
That's what I wish for, but what I believe is more like whatever happens
just happens, and there's little sense looking for a reason for everything.
Sometimes things happen for a reason, but for a reason more grounded in
the things others have done which have caused this one random,
irreproducible event to occur. Chaos theory is therefore very appealing
to me.

I would like to believe there are aliens from other galaxies trying to
contact us, or just watching us. I would like to believe in ghosts,
lost spirits who are not ready to rest for good yet, or who were
kept out of spiritual satiation for some odd reason or another. I
would like to believe in magic, in Egyptian miracle-working, in the
Greek gods, in the Force, in everything supernatural. I do believe
events happen which cannot be explained except by categorizing them
as mythical events, but I'm not sure if I can believe if it actually
is a conscious supernatural force causing those events yet. But oh,
to believe...

Now, moving onto a different area, which will tie in eventually...
Since the advent of the computer, we've begun to rely more and more
upon it over the few decades we've had it. The computer is now in
a significant portion of homes across the world (although we lose sight
of the fact that many people have never even made a phonecall yet),
and it runs the world's banks and airports and security systems and the
Internet. What if one event could crash all those computers simultaneously,
a hacker's wet dream, and cause global confusion and distress, ruining
the economic bonds and systems we've set up so rapidly in the past?
What if planes were to crash, patients were to die, money was to be
scattered across thousands of accounts (or even disappear altogether),
the Internet were to crumble and stop transmitting information, and
the immune hackers and physical looters were to be given a huge open
door to invade our lives?

You know it as Y2K, the big bug that blah blah blah. I don't know how
strongly you feel about the effects of this thing, but I'm honestly
going to say that I don't know what will happen. I know people who
are currently working on fixing Y2K problems for companies' systems,
and they all say that the effects of the bug will extend well past
the beginning of the year 2000, and that the effects could be
extremely serious. Military security is mentioned.

Specialists vary in opinion, saying that very few things will happen
or that whole systems will go down completely, or even worse, fuck
up all the data they contain. The US government is printing up a lot
of extra paper money in anticipation of the panic attack we'll face
at the end of 1999. Global recession, survivalists stocking up supplies
in their compounds, hackers gearing up for the big doggie door upgrade
into the worldwide system. Some people defiantly consider themselves
immune to it all, some even say they'll be happily playing Quake online
when the new year rolls around.

What does the Y2K bug tell us? As some old guy said on 60 Minutes's
report on the bug, the Y2K bug is simply human nature at work. As
much as we try to make things perfect, to improve them to the point
of complete robustness, we always make slight oversights which
cause dramatic consequences. It is our nature to produce mistakes and
errors which we had not seen in our future at the time because we were
so busy indulging in our own ingenuity.

But computers are not supposed to fail. We're supposed to be able to
rely on them to always work. They mechanically perform any operation
we command them to do, without question. We've placed all our confidence
and stock markets and information and secrets onto them, without wondering
what could happen.

At a key point in human history when we have dismissed paper
and religion for computers and reason, we find that computers have
betrayed us because of our own mistakes.

What we blindly believed in so readily bites us in the ass, reminding
us what our true purpose is. Do I believe in this? I think it would
be neat if it were true, but I don't see it as a religious joining
of two events. Coincidence itself is my best guess. However, it's
a cool thing to think about. No matter how much trust we place in
something, we must always keep in mind that one day it may turn on us,
and we must be prepared. We must also accept that any time we try
to create life, or artificial life in this case, that we are challenging
the gods and we will be put in our place for it.

As the Millennium Group says, "This is who we are." "Hoc est qui sumus."
Science and reason teach us to be skeptical of accepting things too easily,
of having in faith without logic for it, but this time, logic has deluded
us into thinking we were safe.

And with not much time remaining, we rush to fix the Y2K bug, and hope
that whatever the worst-case scenarios are that they will not happen
when the year 2000 greets us.

But not every computer network will have its fixes implemented by then,
and so we are basically pawns of fate and luck at this point. How will
the gods punish us for our subordination? What if other cultures' gods
are the true gods, and they don't believe in a millennium? What if
they don't exist at all? What will happen?